The Little Tombstone Cozies Box Set

by Celia Kinsey

  I’d toyed with the idea of enumerating a few things Frank was probably unaware of about my unmet needs, but in the end, I’d let well enough alone. I didn’t even want to go there anymore with Frank.

  Frank claimed he was turning over a new leaf and had eyes only for me. However, my sources on the ground in LA—my friends Erica and Sophie—had informed me that while it appeared to be true that Frank and Shirley had parted ways, Frank had been seen at various venues around town with a statuesque redhead on his arm. Further digging by my friends had revealed that the statuesque redhead was none other than his new office manager, Madeline.

  I fully expected Frank to claim that he and Madeline were strictly professional, but I had evidence otherwise. Sophie had managed to snap a photo of them canoodling in the corner booth of Mortimer’s Jazz Lounge—a place I’d introduced him to when we first got together and still went places on the weekends.

  I was keeping this incriminating photo in reserve for the time being. I was operating under the assumption that Frank did not yet know I was aware of what he’d been getting up to with Madeline.

  “What I don’t understand,” I told Mr. Wendell, “is why Frank is so resistant to giving me a divorce.”

  Mr. Wendell developed a sudden interest in straightening out the already precisely aligned stack of papers on his desk.

  “I think you have a theory about Frank,” I said. “You just don’t want to tell me.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  When I suggested that Mr. Wendell had an as-of-yet-undivulged opinion about Frank’s inexplicable resistance to signing the divorce papers, he turned his attention from the stack of papers he’d been pretending to straighten to the row of pens beside it. He began to line up the pens in exact parallel with the edge of the papers, a procedure which appeared to take all his powers of concentration.

  “You’re supposed to be advocating for my best interests,” I said. It came out a trifle more petulantly than I had intended, but I couldn’t help it. I was growing fed up with the whole situation.

  “I am advocating for your best interests, Emma.”

  Mr. Wendell had addressed me by my first name only once before, so I probably should have taken it for the olive branch it was, but I was too frustrated to let sleeping dogs lie.

  “If you’re thinking of my best interests, then why won’t you tell me the truth?”

  “I don’t know that my supposition has any basis in fact. My opinion is based purely on observing how other unfaithful spouses react under similar circumstances. Every individual case is different.”

  “All right, I’ll take your opinion with a truckload of salt, if that’ll get you to dump it.”

  “I don’t want you to get hurt.”

  “I’ve already gotten hurt, or have you forgotten that my husband had an affair with the woman who took the money from my advance and gambled it away?”

  The money was supposed to have been for Frank’s big office remodel. Frank is a cosmetic surgeon, not that you’d know it by looking at me. I never let him get near me with a scalpel, although I know he was itching to make any number of little “improvements.” I didn’t even let him talk me into Botox.

  “Have you considered that maybe this has been going on for a long time?” Mr. Wendell asked.

  “You mean the thing with Shirley? I doubt it. He only hired her a year and a half ago.”

  “I didn’t mean Shirley specifically.”

  “Oh.” I could hear my breath whooshing out as I said it.

  I stared at Mr. Wendell, who was looking at me the way you look at a baby bird that‘s fallen from its nest. He clearly felt sorry for me but hadn’t the slightest idea whether his efforts to help were going to make things better or worse.

  “You mean you think there were others?” I asked.

  “I think it’s quite likely.”

  “Before Shirley?”

  “Probably.”

  “But what does that have to do with him not wanting to give me a divorce?”

  “A man like Frank likes to be fully in control of any changes to his routine. He likes to keep his options open.”

  “And I’m an option?”

  I thought about all the shirts I’d ironed, and the socks I’d washed, and the endless reassurance I’d pumped into the empty well of Frank’s insecurities after every botched procedure and subsequent anxiety attack that he was going to get sued.

  That was always Frank’s main concern—what his patient’s outrage was going to do to his malpractice insurance premiums—I could not once recall Frank expressing an ounce of remorse about the poor soul who now looked worse than before going under the knife.

  Then I thought of the scores of birthday cards, anniversary flowers, and Christmas gifts I’d bought on his behalf for every member of his family. All he had to do was sign the cards and come out looking like the model son he definitely wasn’t. In the meantime, I’d endured almost a decade of veiled and not-so-veiled accusations that I was a gold digger who’d married Frank for his money.

  Come to think of it, I hadn’t heard boo from Frank’s mother since we’d separated. For an awful moment, I toyed with the possibility that Frank hadn’t even told his family but dismissed it out of hand. We’d always gone to Frank’s parents for Christmas, so when he’d shown up without me in tow, surely questions had been asked.

  “So your theory is that Frank wants to keep me on the hook as a matter of convenience because I’ve made his life comfortable?”

  Mr. Wendell nodded. He’d now moved on from looking at me merely like a baby bird who’d fallen from its nest to looking at me like a baby bird who’d fallen from its nest and into the path of a speeding freight train.

  “You think Frank wants to stay married because he’s too lazy to train a replacement Emma, but if we stay together, he intends on continuing life as a serial philanderer?”

  “I think it’s a good possibility.”

  Come to think of it, the only reason that I’d found out about Shirley was because she’d lost all the money earmarked for the office remodel. After that, I’d started asking a whole lot more questions than I was wont to do. If I thought back, there were any number of little signs that something had been off with our relationship, practically right from the start.

  “Have you ever noticed how similar philandry and philanthropy sound?” I was babbling. I babble when I’m distressed.

  Jason Wendell was now looking at me like I was a baby bird fallen from its nest directly into the path of a speeding freight train headed straight to looney town.

  “Never mind,” I said. “It doesn’t matter.”

  It did matter. I didn’t want to believe that Frank had been carrying on with other women behind my back the whole time I’d been worrying about his tennis elbow, and the possibility that he might be gluten intolerant, and whether the mattress I’d bought for the guestroom would be too firm for his parents’ liking.

  “Based on similar cases,” Mr. Wendell told me. “I expect that soon Frank will make some grand romantic gesture in a bid to win you back.”

  Frank had made a lot of grand romantic gestures when we’d first gotten together, but that had tapered off considerably when he’d secured my affections and dried up altogether after we’d said, ‘I do.’”

  “But I’ve been ignoring all his attempts to communicate,” I pointed out.

  “I know you have, and that’s why I believe he’ll soon resort to pulling out all the stops.”

  Chapter Twenty

  That evening, when I met Ledbetter behind the trailer court, I was still thinking about Mr. Wendell’s insistence that Frank had most likely been cheating on me all along.

  “You ever been married?” I asked Ledbetter.

  He grunted. I did not take that as a “yes” or a “no” but rather as an “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “I’ve been watching the road up to Nancy’s ranch for the last half hour, but nobody’s come down this way,” Ledbetter told me.

/>   I had not been expecting Hugo to leave the ranch until after supper, which I knew Nancy served at six each evening in the main house.

  “I’m guessing we’ll see lights coming down the road in about twenty minutes.”

  “How will we know it’s Hugo?”

  Ledbetter had put his finger on the flaw in my plan.

  “We won’t, for sure,” I admitted. “But August usually stays in evenings to study for his GED, Jasper has gone off the radar, and I specifically checked with Nancy this afternoon to make sure she had no plans to go out.”

  “Does Nancy know we plan to tail Hugo?”

  “Not exactly.”

  I hadn’t informed Nancy of our plans because she hadn’t asked, but since I’d called up to the ranch quizzing her about who might or might not be using the road down from the ranch that evening, I figured Nancy would put two and two together. She wasn’t born yesterday.

  “I think we should keep a good distance back from Hugo. I’ll keep my headlights off.”

  “Won’t that be dangerous?” I asked.

  “Nope.” Ledbetter handed me a pair of googles. “Put these on under your helmet.”

  I fitted the goggles to my face and looked around.

  “What are you doing with night vision goggles?”

  Two pairs of night vision goggles.

  All I got for the trouble of asking the question was another grunt.

  Shortly after 6:30, we saw headlights coming down from Nancy’s ranch. They paused halfway down, probably when the driver stopped to pass through the locked gate. As the pickup passed Little Tombstone, Ledbetter and I lurked in the darkness, our goggles and helmets on.

  Sixty seconds after the driver pulled out on the highway, Ledbetter and I pulled out behind him.

  I had steeled myself for a long, cold ride to the back of beyond, but instead of continuing north out of town, the truck pulled off the paved road and onto Road Runner Alley.

  “I know where he’s going,” I said to Ledbetter through the helmet mike. “Go down Chapel Street, and we’ll go from there on foot.

  We drove to the end of the street and parked in the dirt lot next to the Amatista Chapel. The little house behind the old adobe chapel was where the diocese of Santa Fe had seen fit to bunk up Father Orejo. Through the kitchen window, I could see him chopping up vegetables and then fiddling around with something in a frying pan on a stove. It had never occurred to me to wonder if priests knew how to cook. Did it come as part of the training for rural priests? Father Orejo was not much older than I was, but that still opened up the possibility of him having been something other than a priest during his adult life. Perhaps he’d started out his working life as a chef. He certainly seemed to know his way around a kitchen.

  “Where are we going?” Ledbetter asked.

  “One street over, Road Runner Alley. Janey Hamm’s house is at the end of it.”

  We left our helmets and goggles on the bike, and Father Orejo surrounded by a cloud of steam coming up from the vegetables he’d just added to the frying pan.

  When we reached Janey’s house, her car was parked out front—I’d encouraged her to leave it there so it would be less obvious that she was sleeping elsewhere. Taking it to Little Tombstone and then leaving it overnight would have been a dead giveaway to her whereabouts.

  I looked around, hoping Hugo wasn’t out in the street with us.

  “There’s his truck,” Ledbetter whispered. “He’s still in it.”

  Ledbetter pointed down the street. The truck had parked in front of a derelict old house flanked by vacant lots. The driver was sitting in the truck, lights off, probably assessing the situation.

  The moon was full, which made it easy to see but had the disadvantage of making it easy to be seen. Ledbetter tugged my elbow, and I withdrew even further into the shadows.

  After a couple of minutes, the driver got out of the truck, and gingerly closed the door behind him.

  There was no question it was Hugo.

  He walked down the street, stopping to look around from time to time as if he expected that he might be followed. This made me wonder if there wasn’t someone else interested in Hugo’s nocturnal activities—or at the very least that Hugo was afraid there might be.

  Hugo disappeared around the back of Janey’s house. Ledbetter and I crept from the shadows. By the time we peeked around the corner of Janey’s back porch, Hugo was kicking the backdoor in.

  He was doing it quietly, or as quietly as one can kick a back door in, which is to say, not very.

  “Somebody’s going to call the police,” I said. “Maybe it should be me.”

  Ledbetter stopped me.

  “There’s more at stake here than burglary,” he said. “The essential thing is to find out what Hugo is looking for. I doubt he’s after Janey’s TV or her jewelry box.”

  We skulked away into the sagebrush behind the house for a few minutes just to be sure that no one was going to call the police. I thought it likely Hugo would come back out the same way he’d gone in, and if he found whatever he was looking for he’d come out carrying it.

  It was Ledbetter’s opinion that it was best to let Hugo get on with his work undisturbed, and I had to agree with him, although the occasional crash issuing from the open back door gave me pause. Poor Janey was having her place trashed, and Ledbetter and I were standing by and letting it happen.

  The police never came. I guess no one ever called them. Janey lived at the end of the alley, and the one house opposite hers remained dark.

  After twenty minutes, Hugo came out the back door, seemingly empty-handed. The way he kicked the porch swing so hard it came back and slammed him in the shin was further evidence of his failure to find what he was looking for.

  I may have giggled a little as Hugo yelped in pain until Ledbetter shushed me.

  “Let’s go,” he hissed in my ear.

  “Where?”

  “The bike. Otherwise, we’ll lose him.”

  I predicted that Hugo would go straight back to the bunkhouse, but I was wrong.

  Instead of heading back up the hill to Nancy’s ranch, Hugo drove past the road up to the ranch, past Little Tombstone and south out of town. We tailed him at a distance for less than a quarter mile when he turned off Highway 14 and out through the cactus and sagebrush on a little-used track.

  “You ever been out here?” I asked Ledbetter.

  A crackly voice filtered back through my helmet. He had not.

  We were headed in the general direction of the old amethyst mine in the hills above Amatista, but I didn’t think the road we were on was the one that led to the entrance. In fact, the rough track was veering back in the direction of Nancy’s ranch and Little Tombstone, although a small rise obscured any view of lights from the ranch or the village.

  I didn’t know where we were heading, and I never got to find out because Ledbetter abruptly headed off the road and into the sagebrush.

  “What are you doing?” I demanded as we bumped to a halt, and Ledbetter cut the engine.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  “Somebody’s turned in behind us,” said Ledbetter.

  As we lingered off the side of the road, under cover of darkness, the vehicle passed by us.

  “What was that?” I asked as we watched the taillights receding into the desert.

  “I think it was a semi pulling a car hauler.”

  I’d come to the same conclusion. The semi-tractor had been pulling an empty trailer with slots enough to haul at least half a dozen cars, although it was impossible to count them in the darkness.

  When we got back on Ledbetter’s bike, I was surprised when he turned back towards the highway instead of tailing the semi.

  “I want to see where they’re going.”

  “Let’s go back tomorrow,” said Ledbetter, “when we’ve better assessed the situation, and the place isn’t crawling with people.”

  I thought the “crawling with people” part was most likely an exaggeration, but I w
as forced to concede that Ledbetter was probably wise in aborting our mission. We had no idea where we were headed and what we would find when we got there. It was very likely a dead-end track, and should we get hemmed in, Ledbetter’s bike was not suited to off-roading through the desert.

  As soon as we pulled into the trailer court, and I’d removed my helmet and goggles, I called Officer Reyes’s direct number at his desk at the Santa Fe County sheriff’s office. I didn’t expect him to pick up, and he didn’t.

  “I have reason to believe that Hugo Montrose just kicked in the back door of Janey Hamm’s house and ransacked it,” I said to the machine when it went to voicemail. It was a pompous way of putting it, and I could hear Officer Reyes in my head, saying, “And what is that reason?”

  “Actually, I saw him do it,” I amended.

  Next, I dialed Oliver.

  “Is Janey with you?” I asked. I could hear Janey laughing in the background amidst the excited barking of Earp, the occasional squealing of the piglet, Hercules, and the giggling of a small boy.

  “You’d better come home,” said Oliver. “It was my idea, but things are getting a little out of hand.”

  When I got back to Little Tombstone, it was only a quarter ‘til eight. Ledbetter and I had been gone slightly over an hour, but I returned to chaos. The living room in our apartment had been turned into a studio set.

  Somebody, my money was on Janey, had rummaged a long length of maybe-used-to-be-sort-of-white tulle from the closet at the bottom of the stairs, which was stuffed full of abandoned decorations left over from various events held in the dining room of the Bird Cage.

  Janey was artistically draping the tulle over the couch as Maxwell oversaw the proceedings while seated in state on the high stool we usually kept in the kitchen. Somebody, I suspected Oliver, had taken a black marker to a piece of card cut from a cereal box and written “Director” on it. This sign was taped to the back of Maxwell’s perch.

  I was pretty sure Maxwell had never had quite this much fun in his whole short life, and I hated to be the dark cloud which would inevitably descend over the scene. I’d let Georgia do that bit.